Zora Neale Hurston

Jump at the Sun

Zora Neale Hurston, trailblazing novelist and pioneering anthropologist, is responsible for establishing African American vernacular as a valid voice in literature. With the rediscovery by the modern academic community of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston became one of the first black women to enter the American literary canon. This definitive film biography portrays Hurston in all her complexity: gifted, flamboyant, and controversial, and always fiercely original. The program intersperses insights from scholars and rare footage of the rural South (some of it shot by Hurston herself) with reenactments of a revealing 1943 radio interview, and examines her life both as a writer and as an ethnographer.